Guide to Meta Tags – SEO Basics

What are meta tags?

Which ones are most important for SEO so my business shows up in search engine results?

Common questions I get from business owners looking to attract more relevant traffic to their website. After all, you should be focusing on the areas of your business you are an expert in and let others, like us, handle your digital marketing. Here’s a primer on SEO and meta tags in case you want to tackle your own on-page SEO. Or, if you are a online marketer, it’s a handy SEO reference guide.

Meta Tags

Meta Tags are short pieces of HTML code on your website that give instructions to search engines and help describe your web pages content. Meta Tags are in the head section of the website and are not visible to the site visitor unless they view page source code. Depending on your browser there are different ways to view your page source code.

[insert image of page source here]

Important Meta Tags for Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

Doing SEO work is kinda like being a chef. It’s part science and, well, part art or a more of a subjective practice that you learn to appreciate through experimentation. SEO is not a one-and-done operation. You must continually refine and test in order to stay relevant and on top of the search results for your intended product or business. Google doesn’t give away it’s secret sauce on how it evaluates websites. In fact, they are always changing it and SEO agencies are constantly trying to reverse engineer the sauce so they can provide the best guidance and services to their clients. Anyway, check out these Meta Tags and make some changes to your site if you aren’t already addressing these.

Title Tag

Importance: Very
Syntax: <title>Page Title Here</title>

Purpose
The title tag appears at the top of the browser page. It is one of the two most important tags for SEO. The title tag is used to identify and differentiate each page among others.

[insert image of title tag in browser tab]

Keyword Selection
Keywords used in the page title must be relevant and describe the content of each page. Think about the user, your target customer, and what they might type into the browser as a search query.

Keyword Placement
Through a keyword research exercise determine the best keywords you want to rank for and use them in your title. Put your most important keywords towards the beginning of the page title.

Don’t Do

• Use the same title tag on multiple pages
  Use a different title tag for each of your sites pages. A book doesn’t use the same titles for each chapter, neither should your website.
• Stuff Keywords
  Do not repeat the same keyword over and over. This used to be a tactic to trick the search engines into thinking your page was relevant for that keyword. That lasted about 10 minutes. Google now penalizes websites for keyword stuffing.

Description Tag

Importance: Important
Syntax: <metaname=”description” content=”Description of Page Here”>

Purpose
Provides Search Engines a brief description of the page. Make it real. Google can replace the description if it thinks your description of the page is not accurate. The description tag doesn’t directly effect page ranking in search results. A good description contributes to higher click-through-rates. People are more likely to click a link if they think it will help them with what they need.

Length
Keep under 160 characters to avoid truncation in search results.

Don’t Do

• Don’t leave description tag blank. Search Engines will fill it in for you and you don’t want that.
• Don’t duplicate descriptions. Each page should have unique content with relevant descriptions.

H1 Tag

Importance: High
Syntax: <h1>Header Text</h1>

Purpose
Use this tag as an extension of your title tag. Place the tag at the beginning of your post. Most Search Engines expect only one H1 tag per page, therefor use H2…H4, etc to emphasize other parts.

Meta Robots Tag

Importance: Important
Syntax: <meta name=”robots” content=”<value>”>

Purpose
Instructions to tell Search Engines what to do with the particular page. The following are the most important

• index
  • Allow search engine robots to index the page
• noindex
  • Disallow search engines from showing the page in their results
• follow
  • Tells search engines to follow the links on the page to index them
• nofollow
  • Tells search engines not to follow any links on the page

Social Media meta Tags

Facebook Open Graph Meta Tags
Using Open Graph enables you to optimize how your page appears on someone’s Facebook feed. It allows you to customize how your blog post will show on Facebook.

The most important Facebook tags are:
og:title -specify the title of the content (object), best 60-90 characters.
og:type -specify the type of object for your content, it can be: blog, website or article and more.
og:image -an image URL for the image to show in the user’s timeline.
og:url -the URL of the page
og:description -the description Facebook will show for the content, max 300 characters